Can You Believe Something You’ve Never Seen?

Can You Believe Something You've Never Seen?

(March 13, 2021)

September 29, 2006, Petty Officer Michael Monsoor, a United States Navy SEAL operating in Ramadi, Iraq. Monsoor is on a roof in Ramadi and he's standing in front of a doorway to the roof. He has two Navy SEAL teammates lying in the sniper prone position next to him. They've already taken AK-47 fire and a rocket propelled grenade, but they're not exactly sure where the enemy is. There's a bit of a lull in the fighting. Insurgents have blocked off the streets in Ramadi and there's someone in the town the town mosque on the loudspeaker yelling, kill the Americans.

As Monsoor and his team are looking for the next attack an insurgent from an unknown location throws a grenade up on the roof. It hits Monsoor in the chest and it falls to his feet. Due to the length of the throw, there is no opportunity to pick it up and throw it back, he has only a split second to make a decision. He can leap through the doorway behind him and save himself, but if he does, his two teammates lying on the roof will surely die. Monsoor yells, "grenade!", but instead of jumping backward to save himself, he jumps forward chest first onto the grenade. It detonates. Thirty minutes later, 25 year old Michael Monsoor is dead. His two teammates lying on the roof receiving only minor injuries because Monsoor's body muffled the blast.

One of them said at Monsoor's funeral, Mikey looked death in the face that day and said, you will not take my friends, I will go in their stead. I've never seen a United States President cry until April of 2008. That's when President George W. Bush invited Monsoor's parents into the East Room of the White House to give them their son's Medal of Honor posthumously. The President couldn't even get through the citation without breaking down. There were tears streaming down his face.

Not long ago, Monsoor's High School in Garden Grove, California built a new stadium. They named it Michael A. Monsoor Memorial Stadium. The Golden Trident insignia that the SEALs wear dominates the 50 yard line. January 2019, just outside of San Diego, North Island,

California, the United States Navy commissioned the USS Michael Monsoor, the newest guided missile destroyer in the fleet, Zumwalt class. They escorted Monsoor's mother, Sally, onto the ship named in honor of her son that day they commissioned the ship a couple of years ago.

Now, why did they do this? Because Michael Monsoor literally sacrificed himself to save his friends. There's no greater love than to sacrifice yourself to save your friends, said Jesus of Nazareth just before he went to the cross. Michael Monsoor sacrificed himself to save his friends. The question is, would anyone sacrifice himself to save you? And the answer is, someone already has. His name is Jesus of Nazareth. But in today's culture, a lot of people don't think this story is true. They think it's invented, after all, religious people wrote this down in what we now call, the New Testament, and we know religious people tend to embellish things. Maybe they just made this up. Also, it's got miracles in it this account, especially a resurrection. Everyone I know who is dead, is still dead. We don't believe in miracles anymore. Have you ever seen a miracle? You ever seen someone rise from the dead? How about that one? I never have, yet the entire Christian faith is built on believing something none of us have ever seen. How rational is that?

Well, actually, I think it's quite easy to show that Christianity is true. You only need to answer four questions in the affirmative to show that it's true. And the four questions are: Does truth exist? Does God Exist? Are miracles possible? And is the New Testament reliable enough to show us that Jesus really did rise from the dead? Because if Jesus really did rise from the dead, then game over, Christianity is true. Because if he rose from the dead, he's God, and whatever God teaches is true. Jesus taught the entire Old Testament is the word of God and he promised the New Testament. That's kind of the big picture argument for Christianity.

And what we've been doing here in recent podcast is going through some of the evidence for this. A couple of podcasts ago, or probably three podcasts ago, we talked about this concept that atheists often bring up that, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And if you go back a few weeks ago to hear that, you'll realize that that actually needs a lot of unpacking to understand. And the real truth of the matter is, if anyone's making an extraordinary claim and has no evidence for it, it would be the atheist, not the Christian. And so, we've been going through some of the evidence we covered in the previous show; the cosmological argument, we covered the teleological argument from the fine tuning of the

universe, and also the biological code and other intelligent aspects built into life itself. We talked a little bit about the moral argument. I want to revisit that a little bit here. And then we talked a little bit more about miracles. And we'll cover that a little bit more here on this program. And then I want to get into the New Testament and the resurrection. Because again, if truth exists, God exists, miracles are possible, and Jesus rose from the dead, everything else is academic, everything else falls into place, Christianity is true.

Now, we talked a little bit about the moral argument. We've done several programs on the moral argument on this podcast. If you don't have our app, get the CrossExamined App in the App Store (Cross Examined), and just look for any podcasts in the past couple of years related to the moral argument. You'll see them. So, I'm not going to spend a ton of time on it on it. But I want to point out that everybody I see on YouTube, in particular, who claims to be once a Christian and is now an atheist, or just people who have been atheist their whole lives, they will actually express truths about the moral argument inadvertently.

For example, some of these people come out of very strict, fundamentalist, legalistic homes. And it appears that they are rebelling against that. And look, if I was brought up in such a home, maybe I would, too, because Christianity is not about all just following rules and no, no, no, no. It's not just a religion of no, no, no, no. It's not about working your way to God. It's not about trying to get God to owe you something because God can never owe us something. Christianity is all about grace, that God does all the work and you simply accept what he's done. And after that point, when you accept what he's done, and you love him, then you'll want to do good works in order to bring more people into the kingdom and to enhance your own capacity to enjoy God out of gratitude for what he's done for us. So, it's not a legalistic fundamentalists, kind of works based religion. Unfortunately, many people are taught that, and I understand why they rebel against it.

But let me point this out, that any grounds of rebellion imply that you have some kind of moral right to do your own thing. It implies that you do have a moral right to, say, rebel against what the Bible says, or rebel against what your parents say, or rebel against what society says. Well, here's my question: Where does that moral rights come from? Why is it immoral, in your view, for your parents, the government, or God to put restrictions on you, at least certain restrictions? Because if there is no God, if there is no standard beyond humanity, that wouldn't

be really wrong if they put those moral standards on you. Nor do you really have a moral right to rebel against those standards because there is no moral or immoral behavior. If God doesn't exist, everything is merely a matter of opinion. And if it's merely a matter of opinion, then you will have no grounds by which to object to anything that Christianity says you ought to live by. And I'll get to that right after the break.

You're listening to, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, with Frank Turek on the American Family Radio Network. Our website is . We're back in two.

Welcome back to, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, with Frank Turek here on the American Family Radio Network. We're also on iTunes, we have an app that I mentioned earlier, Cross Examined, two words in the App Store. By the way, for those of you that go to our website to listen to the podcast, we for many months now have been putting, you know, a few days after the podcast is over, we're putting up the transcript. So, if you'd just rather scan through the transcript and see if it's something you want to listen to, or if you heard something on the podcast and just want to have it in written form, you can check the transcript right there on our website, . As I say, it's a few days after you probably hear it on the radio, or hear it on iTunes, or wherever you listen to it. But check that out if you want to have the transcript.

Now, we're talking about the evidence for Christianity and we're just talking a little bit about the moral argument for a second. And in my book, Stealing from God, I talk about this, that atheists are stealing morality from God, as well as many other things, at the same time saying that God doesn't exist. Look, if there is no God, why can you say that the God of the Old Testament is immoral, because you don't have a standard, not an objective standard anyway, by which to say that. Now, here's a fair angle you can take on this. If you're an atheist, the way to say that the God of the Bible isn't the true God would be to say, okay, I'm not I'm no longer an atheist, I believe there's some kind of moral being out there. But the God of the Bible is not that moral being. Okay, that's a fair tack to take. Because at least now you have a moral standard, that you can say, well, the God of the Bible doesn't meet that standard. The problem you run into is all the evidence that points to the fact that the God of the Bible is the true God. And really, that's tied up in Jesus, whether he rose from the dead or not, and what he said

about God, the God of the Old Testament and the Old Testament, in particular. We're going to get there, hopefully today.

So, if Jesus really rose from the dead, then unfortunately for you, you're kind of stuck with the God of the Bible, because he is the true God. If Jesus did rise from the dead and he's just another person, okay, maybe there's just a generic theistic God out there, who does set the grounds for morality. And thereby, you could judge the God of the Old Testament, or the God of the Bible, immoral. But if there is no God, you can't judge anything as objectively moral or immoral. It's just your opinion.

Now, one thing I've also noticed about these former Christians who are now skeptics, and they're YouTubers, or just people who...well, it's mostly the people who claimed to be Christians at one point. This is even true of the progressive Christianity people. And don't get me started on that, because I'll get annoyed. Progressive Christianity is not progressive, and it's not Christian. But that's a whole other story. Go back and listen to Alisa Childer's podcast that she filled in for me a couple of weeks ago on that. But the people who are brought up in legalistic homes, or evangelical homes, who are now saying they're no longer evangelicals, I have not seen a case, ladies and gentlemen...maybe there's some out there...but I have not seen a case, someone who has deconstructed their faith and is no longer a Christian, I have not seen a case that did not cite biblical sexual ethics as a reason to leave Christianity or even to disbelieve in God.

I mean, they always cite the LGBTQ issue. They always say, oh, you know, the God of the Bible doesn't agree with same-sex behavior, so, so much for the God of the Bible. That's just wrong. What do you mean, it's just wrong? Timeout. Where are you coming up with the standard that says it's wrong to be against certain sexual behaviors? What is the moral standard from which you're arguing? Again, if there's no God, there's no right or wrong. There is no right to natural marriage much less same-sex marriage, there's no right. Why? Because there's no right to anything. There's no right to abortion, much less a right to life, because there's no rights to anything if there's no God. But they always cite LGBTQ issues.

I imagine they also personally don't like what Jesus and the apostles have to say about premarital sex either. Right? So, I've never seen a deconstruction that didn't somehow cite sex

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